Access 2000 Simplified, MaranGraphics/IDG Books, 224pp, £23.99 in UK
Marangraphics isn't an author; it's a family. The Maran family, from Toronto, Canada, claims to be the largest computer book publisher in Canada. The head author of the family firm is Ruth Maran, who is extremely prolific, although hardly to the extent claimed by the website: "At the age of 29, she has already authored an impressive six million books". MaranGraphics, with IDG, has produced a series of "Simplified" books at absolute beginner's level, "Teach Yourself" books at a slightly more advanced level and a few "Master" titles for the professionals. Most of the books deal with mainstream Microsoft software.
As the name suggests, MaranGraphics emphasises the visual. The long list of credits reads almost like that of a film: Editing and Screen Captures, Layout Designers, Screen Artist, Illustrators - but no Best Boy. The Marans's technique rests on the use of numerous cartoon illustrations and screen shots and almost no text. This book is colourful and as easy to read as a children's picture book.
The all-graphics approach works well in the Marans's guides to Windows. Teaching us how to perform common tasks, the books function as painless tutorials. But this is Access, a respectable database. Can we learn it that easily? I'm afraid not.
What the book teaches is how to navigate through the Access 2000 menus and how to perform all the common tasks of database creation and maintenance. A mere two pages are devoted to planning the database, thus: Determine the Purpose, Determine the Tables, Determine the Fields, Determine the Primary Key, Determine the Relationships. Now let's do Doctoring Simplified: Examine the Patient, Determine the Illness, Administer the Cure. A few glossy pics and we're away.
While a knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language) is dismissed as unnecessary, the authors feel the need to tell us on every screen shot with a Next button to click Next to continue. The final chapter on publishing your database on the Web is particularly disappointing.
Books like this encourage badly-designed databases by fostering the illusion that all you need to do is click the nearest wizard tool to do your thinking for you. What next - Brain Surgery by Numbers?
Tom Moriarty
Web Workshop, Iona Software, £19.95 sterling
Web Workshop is about the simplest possible introduction to building web sites. It would be ideal for beginner computer classes, or for parents to learn with their children how pages are constructed and eventually appear on the World Wide Web. There is no need to know HTML as the program walks the user through the process.
It offers great artistic scope, with a selection of backgrounds and buttons, or the facility to create others with standard drawing tools. Pictures can be imported and the font, size, colour and style of type can be changed. Sound clips can be added to pages. Creating links to other pages is straightforward enough. When a page is completed within the program, saving it makes the program automatically create HTML coding and .jpg images files for it.
A modem and Internet Service Provider account are required to set up email links to pages or to publish a site. The publishing part is a little difficult for beginners, but they can publish to the Iona Software site for 30 days free of charge and this is explained in the manual.
This manual booklet is very basic and there almost no online help available, but this package is still great fun and great value. It is not comparable to much more powerful (and expensive) web-authoring programs such as Front Page or Dreamweaver. It doesn't deal with frames, tables, forms or any kind of animation but still offers a chance to produce a colourful and classy site.
Tony Dooley